Virtualization news from VMware and the community of virtualization users, including the VMware Communities and VMTN, the VMware Technology Network.

Monthly Archives: July 2010

Two of my colleagues recently launched a new website. It is probably one of the few vCenter Orchestrator Blogs out there and definitely worth following for anyone who is into orchestration and automation.

One of the first articles explains how to create a self provisioning portal with vCO in a detailed stepwise approach. They have just published a follow called "part 2". The article cover the following steps which result in a self provisioning portal:

How to create a simple Workflow

How to map inputs, outputs, and attributes

How to launch a Workflow from a webview, using the vCenter Orchestrator Weboperator

How to launch a Workflow from the vCenter Orchestrator Client

How to create a Workflow using subworkflows

How to map inputs, outputs, and attributes

How to use user interactions

How to do basic presentations

How to use validation presentation properties

How to handle exception and write to the event log

How to use vCO Server and System objects in scriptable boxes

How to use the API search

How to launch a Workflow from the vCenter Orchestrator Client

How to launch a Workflow from a webview, using the vCenter Orchestrator Weboperator

We've very pleased to announce the availability of VMware vSphere 4.1 and several other products today. Here's an initial overview of what's new and what's changed. (Updated 7/13 with press releases, blog posts)

The Press Releases

At VMware, our press releases are very readable and actually worth checking out. Here are the highlights for the two releases that came out July 13:

Blog Posts

from VMware CTO Steve Herrod: "And I thought I’d close with a bit tech-y, but great quotation about this release from one of our more than 800 beta-testing customers… "This release has the stability of a ‘dot-1’ release with the advancements of a ‘dot-0’ release". Indeed!"

from VMware Marketing VP Bogomil Balkansky: "VMware is bringing the benefits of cloud computing to internal datacenters by helping customers more efficiently and effectively manage existing applications while building the path to the private and public cloud. This is what virtualization is all about. By enabling an evolutionary approach to cloud, VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter are the foundation for our cloud strategy"

Been really busy today with the kids but did manage to get the top 5 ready for you guys…. Read it!

Thomas Mackay – Understanding ESX/ESXi Equivalency…Are we there yet?It is public knowledge that ESX is evolving to a pure ESXi model in the future release cycles of the product, though exact timelines are still under NDA. Convergence to a “console-less” ESX provides a number of benefits to our customers, with which many of you are, by now, well acquainted . It reduces the overall footprint that requires patching (see below) as well as removes the dependency on the vestigial RHEL-based Console Operating System, and sets the stage for future enhancements and technologies yet to be introduced. (Those who are under NDA might know to what I am referring!

Thakala(vReality) – VMware Data Recovery 1.2 Linux file level restore clientI have successfully tested it on 64-bit CentOS 5.5, and because so many versions of Ubuntu are listed I’d guess that FLR client works on any recent Debian releases also, just make sure it has support for FUSE 2.5 or later. If you have custom kernel make sure you have all FUSE dependencies compiled in. Note that even though your Linux distribution may be 64-bit version, 32-bit version of FUSE is required. Note the absence of any SuSE or Novell SLES distrubtions from tested and supported list, not that FLR client won’t work on them though, I am sure it will.

Jon Owings – All out of HA SlotsAs you can see here the slot size is rather giant. We have the largest CPU and Memory reservation plus some overhead (for simplicity) and that blows the size of the slot way up. I didn’t set the reservation, but surely they were there. 8GB of reserved memory. 4000MHz of CPU. Ouch. Where did that come from? It followed the VM from the old host to the new one. One of the reasons I was there was to setup a new cluster since the older ones were performing so slow on the local storage. It seems like someone tried to help some critical VM’s along the way by adding the reservations. I removed the reservations and had plenty of slots as you see below.

Massimo Re Ferrre – Cloud and the New IT PillarsIn my previous IT life I was in the business of trying to homogenize heterogeneous virtualization platforms under a single management umbrella so I have to (strongly) agree with my colleague’s statement. In fact, these pillars are very different in the way you manage them. This is true not only from a technology perspective but also, and even more so, from a process perspective. For example, the process to request a partition on a legacy Unix system may be totally different than the process required to instantiate a new physical server, which in turn is totally different than the process to request a new vSphere virtual machine. To complicate things more, the Cloud pillar, by very definition, doesn’t require any process whatsoever to instantiate a new workload from the self-service portal.

Duncan Epping – vSphere 4 U2 and recovering from HA Split BrainI had never noticed this until I was having a discussion around this feature with one of my colleagues. I asked our HA Product Manager and one of our developers and it appears that this mysteriously has slipped. As I personally believe that this is a very important feature of HA I wanted to rehash some of the info stated in that article. I did rewrite it slightly though…